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Resonance and Reflection: We race ghosts in a Viper GTS: . . . Accompanied by a man who remembers when the ghosts were alive

April 2, 2012

Autoweek's Viper Week explores past articles and reviews ahead of the reveal of the new Viper at the New York auto show.

With the public debut of the 2013 SRT Viper scheduled for the New York auto show, we've scoured the Autoweek archives to bring you some classic Viper stories from our past. For exclusive Viper Week content including the latest news as it happens, check out Autoweek's Viper Week.

By Kevin A. Wilson, originally published in Autoweek 07/08/1996.

It's not the stuff of a Parisian's dreams, this creeping along in surges up to 10 mph, listening to valve clatter, a cammy idle lope, and the ka-chunk of a drivetrain that can't quite cope with locomotive-like torque, while the footwell grows so hot your sneakers are sticking to the pedals. No sir, that's the American muscle car cruiser's strut on Woodward Avenue. But that's definitely Paris outside the windshield, and the high-lift cam, clanking driveline and hot footwell are all characteristics of the Dodge Viper GTS coupe.

So when the traffic signal goes green, a Detroit boy's right foot itches to slam the throttle home and lay a pair of big black streaks down the cobbled Champs-Elysees. The burnout would naturally include the roar of V10 thunder, announcing in brash, confident, maybe even ugly American fashion that The Yanks are Coming. Again.It can't happen, of course. The Avenue des Champs-Elysees is jammed with traffic on an early Friday afternoon, and we're in flying formation, three cars wide. The cars encircling us are also Vipers, a baker's dozen coupes in blue and white, set off by three red roadsters. The convoy assembled on the Avenue de la Grand Armee, along which Napoleon once marched his victorious soldiers, and it proceeded through the traffic circle around the Arc (a driving experience that's equal parts nightmare and slapstick) and down the Champs to the Place de la Concorde, where it gave a nod toward the headquarters of the Automobile Club de France, the world's oldest motoring club and the birthplace of the FIA, the governing body of motorsport.

The thrum of 16 Vipers sounds like a flight of B-17 warbirds. World War II is conjured up, too, in the gapes we draw from Parisians-the sweet young thing hitching a ride with her right thumb in an exaggerated motion that starts at her left hip and ends with a bump of the other, the old ladies who raise their small yappy dogs in protective hugs to their bosoms, the young fathers turning their little boys to look and wave. We know we are not really the liberating forces that received similar welcomes more than 50 years ago. But it's close enough to pretend.

There are resonances and reflections here. We've heard echoes and caught shimmering glimpses over the past four days, as we drove these new GTS coupes on a grand tour of great road racing tracks: Nurburgring, Spa and Reims. We have traveled the whole way with ghosts. That there are more ghosts at the end of our journey in the heart of Paris should be no surprise.

Lafayette, We Are Back

"You do not fully appreciate what a big deal it was for Europeans when Americans came here to race," Chrysler engineering vp Francois Castaing said at dinner the night before. "It was considered an honor, a sign of respect and recognition."

Castaing grew up in France, a racing fan who eventually led Renault's motorsports department in the days of Turbo F1 cars and a wave of French talent that included a young fellow named Alain Prost.

Twenty years before that, Castaing remembers, Americans had sent a wave of talent washing into the European racing scene. We are guided on this particular journey by eyewitnesses to that era: Phil Hill, America's first World Driving Champion (1961), and photographer Jesse Alexander, who chronicled the great events of Grand Prix and sports car racing in Europe from the mid-1950s into the 1970s. As a bonus, although he is here as a journalist, not a guide, the party includes Peter Brock, designer of the Cobra Daytona coupe that won the World Manufacturers' Championship in 1965. The Daytona coupe inspired the GTS.

The photos Alexander shows each evening are populated with many American faces, but few American cars. Those that do appear, Eagles and Chaparrals and Cobras and GT40s, do not bear the Chrysler Pentastar. Chrysler has no desire to claim another's heritage; it does not mean to say, "Look what we did," so much as, "We remember, and it was special."

Phil Hill tells the group that the Reims circuit is the birthplace of the modern-era French Grand Prix, and that it was active from 1925 to 1970, though at the end only for sports cars. This high-speed track, essentially a triangle of public roads through wheat fields in the Champagne region, is where Hill drove in his first F1 Grand Prix, as a freelancer in 1958. He was 31 and an experienced racer, and was supposed to drive a Ferrari, because Ferrari's drivers were being punished for some misdeed, but the rift was healed before the race, and Enzo Ferrari arranged for Hill to drive a Maserati instead.

This was also the first GP for Carroll Shelby, and it was Troy Ruttman's only GP in Europe; all three Americans drove Maserati 250Fs. It was Juan Fangio's last race, the last GP win for 1958 champion Mike Hawthorn and, it turned out, the last race for Ferrari driver Luigi Musso.

"Hawthorn always set his car up with tons of understeer; we used to tease him about it," Hill recalled the evening before we visited Reims, as he went over a map of the course. "Here, just along here after the first big turn past the pits, was a really dicey place where the tail of the car would go very light and you'd have to ease off. Except for Hawthorn, who had all this understeer in his car; he could just go through there flat out."

Reims was once the fastest track in road racing; in the last F1 event there in 1966, John Surtees lapped at an average of 144 mph, and Jack Brabham won the GP at 137 mph. (Jim Clark and Dan Gurney bested those respective marks the next year at Spa.) Today the pits and grandstand are overgrown with weeds, and the sponsor logos painted on the buildings are faded, flaking and weathered. But the road is still there. The first bend is fast and open and leads into a broad curve where you can keep your foot down hard in an understeering Viper GTS. Then the tail starts to get a little hinky, and you can't see around the corner past the wheat, and you know there's a stop sign out there in the middle of what used to be the straight, so you lift; or is it just that you remember Hill's words from the night before?

"Musso killed himself because he tried to follow Hawthorn through there, flat, and of course he couldn't because he didn't have the understeer. The car went off, cartwheeling all along here and into the ditch."

Accelerating hard from the stop sign where this track crosses one of its own earlier incarnations, you can get to 130 mph, maybe a bit more, before you need to brake hard to make the turn onto RN31, the main road between Reims and Soisson, once the fastest part of the track, a straight downhill leading to the tight Thillois hairpin. Today, we chug along behind heavy traffic.

That morning we had ridden to Reims with Hill, and had come onto the circuit at its northern extreme, Virage de Muizon, and headed down the hill on RN31. Peering ahead, Hill got excited when he spotted the right-hand Thillois hairpin, actually the intersection with route D27 leading to the village of Gueux. "Yes, yes this is the place," he said. "At this hairpin up here, Thillois, I became the master of spinning."

The penalty for leaving your braking too late was minimal here, Hill explained. So, "I just left my braking later and later all the time. I'd spin maybe once in 50 laps, but you made enough time on the other 49 to make up for it! I went under Jack Brabham here one time and left it too late, spun, and just came roaring back from the other side. See? Over there!"

Over There

The directions from our Belgian hotel to Spa are a little unclear, so a cluster of Viper coupes winds up parked at roadside for an exchange of baffled expressions. When Hill and Alexander zip through, we follow. They've been there a few times before.

The modern course is 4.3 miles, and it incorporates some of the old. It's still intriguing, but less than half the original Spa-Francorchamps, which started at 9.3 miles in 1925 and was only down to 8.76 by the time it was abandoned for the new circuit in 1979. Made up entirely of public roads, the old course can still be driven, except that during our visit the portion in front of the modern F1 pits was being repaved for this year's Grand Prix.

It was another May at Spa, in 1964, that Hill demonstrated the new Cobra Daytona's aerodynamic advantage over the roadster on a European road circuit (it had already been proven out at Daytona). As Brock tells it, the car was at first nearly undriveable at this fast course, which is characterized by significant elevation changes, long straights and broad, sweeping turns, many of which were negotiated at 130 mph or better. When Hill complained that the coupe went light as it crested hills and through fast turns, mechanic Phil Remington banged together a sheet-aluminum spoiler that he attached to the top of the Kammback tail. It first proved too effective, making the front-end light at speed, but lowering it an inch made it just right.

Hill qualified second, but the revised spoiler gave him a tremendous advantage at the start, and he left everyone behind as the field leaped up the hill through Eau Rouge and Les Combes. But Hill came in last at the end of the lap, stopping in the pits to complain of no fuel pressure. A quick check showed there was pressure with the car parked in the pits, so he was sent back out, only to return with the same complaint about performance at speed. The fuel filters were checked, and found to be full of what Brock characterizes as "cotton waste." Some believe to this day that it was sabotage. Others, including team manager John Wyer, figured some mechanic had just left a rag in the wrong place.

Either way, Hill was three laps behind. He put on one of the best driving demonstrations of his career, beating the F1 lap record and setting a fast race lap of 4:04.5, or 4.5 seconds faster than pole-sitter Michael Parkes' qualifying time in a Ferrari GTO. Parkes got down to 4:07.8 himself, but Hill still caught and passed him to regain one lap. More trouble with the fuel held him back, though, and he wasn't even classified a finisher.

A 450-hp Viper makes climbing through Eau Rouge today seem easy enough, but you can also understand Hill's assertion that getting this turn absolutely right was vital to good lap times all the way around the circuit. Eau Rouge was most critical in the less-powerful 1.5-liter F1 cars of his era, which relied on handling and precision for their speed. For most of the 1.5-liter era, Jim Clark, whose own speed came from his superior precision, was unbeatable at Spa, winning four Belgian GPs in a row, in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1965.

Clark's bid for a fifth win in 1966 saw his car stall on the grid, and he blew the engine trying to make up lost time. It was the first year of the 3.0-liter formula, and memorable not only for the filming of the movie Grand Prix, but for the beginning of a series of accidents that added to the circuit's treacherous legend for having rain falling on some parts while others were dry. The race started dry but the leaders hit heavy rain on the first lap, Hill remembers, and went off course in all directions. Jackie Stewart wound up in a ditch with a broken collarbone and cracked ribs, jammed in his upside-down car's cockpit while fuel dripped from his BRM's tanks and soaked his uniform, burning his skin. Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant, both of whom had also crashed in the rain, got Stewart out. The incident marks the start of the serious safety movement in F1 racing.

This movement was roughly coincident with the first safety measures (mandatory seatbelts) in American cars. The 1996 Viper GTS has dual airbags (roadsters had only driver's side), side-guard door beams and other modern safety features. It also has a pronounced spoiler built into its tail, but with the road open to traffic, we're not pressing hard enough for that to matter. We'd done the fast stuff the day before, on the old circuit at Nurburgring.

Ride of the Valkyrie

Were there not a border between Belgium and Germany, the forests and mountains around Nurburgring and Spa might share a name. Germany's Eifel and Belgium's Ardennes are contiguous, and Spa is only 10 miles from the border. The difference today is that Nurburgring was built as a dedicated race course in a public works project led by Dr. Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne. It employed 3000 people between 1925 and 1927, in a Germany still in the throes of its post-World War I depression. Today, anyone can drive a lap for 15 DM (about $10); subsequent laps come at a discount. You must come to a full stop at the end of each lap, if for no other reason than to prevent direct comparison to racing lap records.

Part of the Nurburgring legend is that the 176-turn course is so long that no one can memorize it.

Or where it doesn't. More of the legend is that cars can fly there, launched into the air by dramatic drop-offs. There's a 3000-foot elevation change over the length of the circuit, and the transitions come in a series of hops and bumps. Castaing tries flying the Viper, holding his foot down hard at the Flugplatz (the flying place), about 1.25 miles from the start. He says it makes for a good roller coaster ride, but he didn't catch air.

The ghosts are everywhere. There's a place out there where Peter Collins died in 1958, in a crash seen by his friend and teammate Hawthorn, who was moved to retire after that season in which he narrowly bettered Moss for the title.

And we can hear the ghosts yammering at us, in the whomp-whomp-whomp as our Viper crosses the expansion joints in the banked, inner lane of the Karussel. POP! We are flung out of the Karussel and down a hill toward another series of fast open turns. Imagine doing that in one of the monster pre-World War II Mercedes-Benz or Auto Union Grand Prix cars, which had 100 horsepower more than these Vipers, and rode on hard, skinny tires.

Or put the hammer down on the one long straight, and as the speedometer needle crosses 160 mph and you bounce around on the rippling pavement, remember that Fangio, in his epic 1957 drive, decided not to lift for the ensuing bend, converting one long and one short straightaway into a single, flat-out dash. His Maserati 250F soared across the dip in the middle and fetched up against the edge of the road on the other side, not just once, but for 10 laps. By such daring, against all odds after a long pit stop, Fangio caught and passed the leading Ferraris of Collins and Hawthorn.

But that was Fangio. We not only lift for the bend, but tap the brake for good measure. We're in no hurry to join the ghosts.

That muscle car motor generates unbelievable torque-490 lb ft from 488 cubic inches. If you're not serious about seeking speed, you could do the whole 'Ring in third and fourth gear. Up the steep hills, even when we're a gear or two higher than ideal, it pulls like a train. And the whole car feels stable and secure-just cruising really-at 120 mph. This is most emphatically not true of Viper roadsters, which can encounter a tar strip at 80 mph and shake like a wet dog. We got the GTS to do that just one time at over 100 mph, with a lot of weight transfer onto the right front just as that corner of the car went over some rough pavement that we would have avoided, had we been more familiar with the track.

In other respects, the stiffer, lighter chassis of the GTS and the more compliant suspension, pay dividends. Both on the open road and on the track, we never feared that this Viper was going to bite us without warning.

A few new things did crop up since our earlier test (AW, March 4). There's a boom in the cabin caused by the resonating exhaust note at the sedate speed of 70 mph. It appeared late in development; engineers are looking for a way to soften the sound or move it to a speed that is encountered less frequently.

Under hard braking from high speed, the tail can be darty. Once when entering a downhill turn, the right rear locked up and wouldn't let go until we completely released the brakes. This happened on the same stretch of road where Niki Lauda crashed, as if a phantom hand had seized the brake rotor. (It was that crash in 1976 that ended F1 racing on the long circuit.) Viper engineers offer a more prosaic explanation: At the root of it is the composition of the brake pads, which must meet the conflicting demands of a federally required braking test from 150 mph (as a percentage of the projected top speed in the upper 180s), and of car magazine tests from only 60 mph. The compromise may be tilted too far toward the slower speed, so that in racetrack circumstances, simply easing off the pedal pressure doesn't suffice to release a locked wheel.

Hill encounters a different brake problem that ends our exercise at the 'Ring: He stomps the pedal and there is no one home. Some braking returned-evidenced by black skid marks-but not soon enough to stop him from folding up the right-front suspension against a guardrail less than a mile onto the course. Hill is clearly embarrassed. "I don't know what happened," we hear him tell

Castaing. "It didn't do what I expected." Later, on our ride to Reims, Hill suggests that the brake fluid may have boiled; soon after the cars had negotiated the long, fast straight, and a few fast curves, they were brought to a full stop and sat, awaiting the next lap. "Whatever it was, there were no brakes."

We'd say it wasn't his fault, but Hill-like many racers, at least from his era doesn't think that way.

At the Automobile Club of France in Paris on our last night, we have a long dinner-table conversation that centers on Hill's tendency throughout the trip to refer to his contemporaries' deaths by saying "So-and-so killed himself by doing such-and-such." Musso "killed himself" trying to follow Hawthorn at Reims, for example, and Collins "killed himself" at the Nurburgring.

"Do you really believe they were all responsible for their own deaths, that they somehow could have avoided the accidents or the injuries?" Hill is asked. And the answer boils down to, yes, he does, even when there is mechanical failure-there's always something to learn from such crashes, he explains, and if you keep learning from them you'll know what to do when you have your own. You'll control your own fate.

Surveying Paris on a soft spring night from the ACF balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, looking down onto the top of a Le Mans-bound Viper GTS-R parked out front, we see ghosts flicker in our peripheral vision and hear them speak in the echoes of footsteps in the halls. Phil Hill seems to know them by name.